On Western Culture

It can be said that our weakest front has been the conservative side of things in the political spectrum. For Western culture is so nuanced and has a history so deep and complex that it is easy to lose sight of who we are if our backgrounds are indeed from Western civilization. From the philosophers of Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, our history is one of hard lessons and immense power.

From what was once called “Christendom” to what now could be referred to as liberal society, we have to look at the structure of Western society as a progressive set of self-reformations that have memory and purpose in increasing the quality of life for as many individuals as humanly possible without compromising human freedom — especially freedom of thought.

For if there is anything that defines Western traditions, it may be summed up in one word: “liberation.” But not just liberation for the few, because that is the status quo of the common human civilization — no, but the liberation of the human species from their self-inflicted bondage and domination. Towards those ends all of our industry, science, and philosophy need to be oriented if we are to continue to call ourselves the West in any way that resembles the traditions that preceded us and the hard-won lessons of our past.

And yet we have come to a new problem in this new age — one where freedom from the very lessons is being requested. For who has the right to educate us, they now ask? Who has the right to determine what we consider good, what we consider right, or what we consider God? All fair questions, mind you, insofar as they don’t tear republics apart. And so we must wager for ourselves whether humanity truly is intelligent enough to have this conversation. If you look at the Far East, it is evident that most civilizations do not think that people are intelligent enough to have this conversation. In China, forced education and philosophical education are such an ingrained part of their society at this point that the very thought of allowing people to decide what is the right philosophy to begin with is a fool’s errand.

And yet we are so busy that we cannot educate our own children, and yet there are certain things we would rather have churches educate our children about than the actual educational institutions. And so I’ve devised for myself a less inclusive society where, much like a church, admittance is voluntary. For we cannot allow the culture itself to disintegrate as soon as people start pulling out of the program, but they are right on the very far-right side of the spectrum that the state should not be in charge of other people’s education. No, I do not believe leaving our education in the hands of a 2000-year-old monastic institution is a viable supplement for 20th-century sciences and philosophies. That being said, I do believe some such institution is necessary to give a society a certain backbone so it can stand upright on its own and stop flailing around like a child.

And so Western society needs to evolve, and if we’re going to continue the experiment of having many freedoms and many rights in these societies, and if we are to start to be inclusive of those who want to take away the rights of others, then we’re going to have to stop treating it as a guaranteed society and more like a war zone of ideologies competing to see which will become the dominant force given enough time. For those of us who are educated enough in Western traditions to know the nature of liberal society, we too need for ourselves an institution much like a church — but an educational institution, a therapeutic, a charitable, and hospitable institution — to do the philosophical educating that schools are losing the public license to operate.

And so we have to look not only to the churches for a good template but to our philosophers and our histories and cobble together a new ethic for a new ethos which can compete with the old and adapt to the new and generate for ourselves a new order — an order within an order that is meant to uphold a new way of doing things based on all of the old lessons of industry, science, and progress. For we are human beings, the most adaptable species of the planet Earth, and to stop adapting is to die. Now it needs to be said that I indeed am a Gnostic, a follower of the original sayings of Jesus, and that I hold the Church to high esteem in many ways, especially the Unitarians.

But to achieve a true Catholicism — and by that I mean a universal philosophy of religion — we need to be more intelligent about how we look at our histories, at our cultures, and why we no longer call ourselves “Christendom” but instead now call ourselves the free world. We must reconcile the fact that freedom is a very difficult thing to attain and that it appears to be an ever-evolving state of things, for freedom is like a hunted rabbit — for it to stay in one place is for it to admit defeat, for all the forces of the world seek to dominate it.

And we cannot be naïve in the matter that we are trying to build an empire — an empire of nations. So of course we need our greatest power to have its house in order, and we should all take some responsibility for the order of the core of the empire. Of course, I’m talking about the responsibility that the rest of NATO has in upholding the integrity of the United States of America’s culture. Sometimes it is necessary for a friend to correct another friend, especially when that one friend holds the entire society’s well-being in order. But first, let’s fix our own house — and by our house, I mean Canada. Let’s create a nation of autonomous nations. Let’s show how it can be done so that the rest of the world can again follow.